


Beliefs

by Skeren



Category: Naruto
Genre: Frustrated Danzo, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Past Character Death, References to Genocide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-27
Updated: 2016-02-27
Packaged: 2018-05-23 10:51:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6114238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skeren/pseuds/Skeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danzo had never viewed himself as a good person. He never thought he was stronger, more powerful, or even more intelligent than anyone else. He just knew he paid better attention. He knew he tended to see things that others deliberately made themselves blind to, be it through pain or hate, sadness or even <i>hope</i>, that terrible drug that it was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beliefs

**Author's Note:**

> Written February 2015 and posted to my Danzo account on tumblr, Konohawarhawk.

Danzo had never viewed himself as a good person. He never thought he was stronger, more powerful, or even more intelligent than anyone else. He just knew he paid better attention. He knew he tended to see things that others deliberately made themselves blind to, be it through pain or hate, sadness or even _hope,_ that terrible drug that it was. 

Hope was probably the worst of them all. They were shinobi. They fought and bled and died for the sake of coin and prestige. What about that should inspire hope? What about that was there that should make a shinobi stand up and say that they were a peaceful people?

They weren’t. To be truly peaceful was to be without war and death, and that would never be any of the villages. That would never be shinobi. That would never be _Konoha._ He’d been lulled by that idea, once, long ago. In fact, as a small child, having a single place to call home had practically been nirvana compared to what had come before, and he had been enthralled. Those who made it so had fostered hope in his heart…

And then reality had come and that hope had been shattered all over the floor. He hadn’t learned from the first time, but the subsequent fall of both Senju leaders after that? It had been enough to finally make the lesson stick. One should not hope. One should not have _faith,_ because they will end up betrayed and alone with duties that they had never anticipated should they try.

You cannot help those you care for because the world will find a way to make you helpless, and all your efforts will be in vain when it is time for choices to be made that cannot be unmade. If that person is to die, even the most intense protection, the best faith, will not be enough. They will find a way to die. Worse, when they don’t want to die and you do all you can to help them, then they die anyway.

Somehow, then, it seems like it’s your fault. You might know it isn’t, might intellectually be aware, but that does not mean you will believe in the end of it. 

And Danzo learned these lessons in blood and misfortune. He saw the way death was easy come, even in moments of peace. He saw the way people made choices in selfishness and crumbled everything around them. He saw, and he remembered. He learned his lessons. 

Thus, his eyes were open. The world moved on and he saw the way even those he trusted refused to see, the way that he had to steer the blind around corners that would have been obvious if they’d simply opened their eyes to the reality of the life that they were actually living.

You can’t just pretend that everything is getting better without consequence, however. Danzo saw it coming, the crumbling of the Uchiha, and he knew there was nothing he could do about it, so he let Hiruzen try.

It was one time, no matter how long that time was, that he actually closed his eyes. He let himself believe. And that led to a spiral of even deeper misfortune. 

In spite of what many believe, Danzo had never had it out for the Uchiha. He respected them, as a clan, respected their abilities and the potential of those that came to the village. He didn’t like the isolation, the way that they were left to fester in small resentments. But he worked around it.

He had his ROOT, his people who would do things so that Hiruzen could keep his white knights as bloodless as he could, could keep up the image that Konoha was softer and more brilliant than the tarnished skies and bloodstained trees would attest. It worked well, and even if he lied, Danzo knew he would do the same. 

Not everything in Konoha was darkness, and it was better that it was presented to the world as something more beautiful than the foundations of reality. He would protect that image to the death because it helped keep Konoha safe and prosperous. It was one thing he’d never sought to change, for all his haggling and prodding to lead in his life. He just wanted to change some things that should not have _been._

But Hiruzen had to step down, and the boy he chose? There was potential there. In fact, Danzo had seen things in the boy, a _sight_ that he had approved of… but while the boy may have seen, he didn’t know how to play a long game. Everything was now, and speed, and instant need. The way the Kyuubi situation was handled was more than proof of that.

There had been no winning that day. He’d kept the Uchiha back as the lesser of two evils, but he’d done them no favors. If they’d been at the front they would have been blamed as surely as they were when he held them back. The people wanted to blame them.

There was resentment, and a need for conflict that was upheld from the older generation that had not had time to be scrubbed clean, that could not be washed away no matter what was done…

And so things seemingly returned to what they were, and Hiruzen made more mistakes than he ever had before in his desperation to make things as they once were in truth. You cannot undo the past, however, no matter what you wish, and Hiruzen played the field as though it was before the village had been harmed.

He did not play it as the changed world it was. He closed his eyes again and all of Danzo’s clawing and fighting did not make him see… until one day Hiruzen turned a blind eye to him too. It was worse, then.

He was no longer seen or heard, and was practically a free agent because of it… But how do you advise those who cannot hear you? How can you change the path of a village that cannot see you? You can’t.

He could do nothing in the face of Hiruzen’s willfully blind apathy. In the face of the poison of _hope_ that led him to the choice that was to pretend all would be well. His measures were too small and too few and in the end, much, much too late.

And Danzo watched. He planned. He waited; because there was nothing else he could do. He knew that. He knew and he grasped the exact moment that things broke around Hiruzen. He knew the moment the Uchiha were taking those last steps.

Hiruzen, whose fondest wish was that children be children, started to destroy one of the brightest stars, the brightest _hopes_ in the village. That was when Danzo knew. He knew there would be no going back, and that all his words and attempts to do anything would be overthrown.

So he made his peace with it. If one mourned the past, one was clouded against the future, one was not perceptive to the present. You remembered, and you learned, and you perhaps regretted the need, but you never regretted doing because it would drown you. It would destroy you from the inside out and make you hollow and prone to mistakes.

Hiruzen had done that, and it had ruined one of the shining gems of Konoha.

He had lost the Uchiha.

So the day he had to give a child the orders, had to give a boy the _mercy_ of being a killer? It was no day that pleased him. He resented Hiruzen for being blind, and there was only bitter consolation that the man, be dearest _Hokage_ was willing to let it stand as the mercy it was meant to be.

He knew it wouldn’t be seen that way by most, though. They would see the innocents that would die. They would see those that knew nothing, could have seen nothing, and wonder why they too had to die. And they would not understand. They would blind themselves to logic, and not understand the inherent mercy of what he had asked. Not mercy for Itachi, there was no way to be merciful to that boy, but for those that died… yes.

The Uchiha were a clan who loved. They banded together as a unit, and the loss of some was the loss of everything to others. He’d seen it. He’d lived long enough to see Uchiha crack and break because of it, and he knew, _knew_ that it would be the harshest punishment for a child to live when everyone around them fell.

And Itachi pleaded for that hell for his sibling. 

So he gave it. He let the boy make his mistake, and he gave it. 

In that, he knew that at least other children would not suffer the same grief, that there would not be angry, resentful orphans out to hurt and harm while having been crushed by the weight of the deaths around them. They would not wake to the dead bodies of their families, they would not live knowing that they were skipped over on some kind of fluke. They would not suffer a world that would only hate them for things they do not understand.

But Itachi wanted that life for his brother, and so it was given. That hateful terrible life was given, and he found himself forbidden from easing the burden, as he had expected to be so.

Hiruzen would let him touch no one who he could truly help, after all, no one of import, and the fool, the blind, idealistic _fool_ would slowly tear apart the inside because of it. In the end, however, he bowed his head to his Hokage, and he did as told to the extent that such decrees were made.

Thus, time passed and he watched a wound fester, he saw the way Hiruzen left children to wolves in a way that he claimed was merciful. He saw the way that Hiruzen encouraged ghosts to eat the hearts of those innocent. 

At least he made no presumptions as to what he did. His people were trained, they were cared for… and he did all he could to ease them so that they would not have a life of suffering. He knew that made him seem a monster. How dare he steal emotions from children and make them his soldiers…

At least, he was sure that was what was said. He did what he needed to do. He took what needed taken and made them stronger so they would not break. He also did not use the same way on all. He did not presume that every child was the same as every other, and he would never have treated the white Knights of Konoha in the same way as his ROOT. 

They needed to have different values.

But Danzo knew that this was not an understood thing, and he suffered in silence Hiruzen’s mistakes, his secrets in the wrong places, and he worked on other things.

It was unfortunately no shock at all when Hiruzen’s mistakes, the ones he let color everything else, were the cause of his death. He just wished he’d been able to move faster, to take charge then before the Uchiha boy was lost to the village. 

But that was not how it worked out, and time passed on in unfortunate manner. He watched, he waited, and he saw someone in charge that had too much to fix and too little awareness of the situation to do everything she could. 

But she was managing.

She was.

Right up until Konoha was destroyed, she was _managing._

It was too much, even for Danzo, it was too much. He couldn’t handle another rash of regret and mistakes, he couldn’t wait to see who would further ruin the bits of Konoha that remained.

His biggest contenders were the ones that hadn’t lived. Unfortunate, that those who didn’t see the village ruined and gone were the ones that didn't _understand._ They hadn’t felt the crushing blow of losing everything at once. They just died, and death was so much easier than going on. Death was a reprieve, an end, a resting point. Death was not carrying on when everything was shattered around you, and Danzo knew they could never understand that pain.

They were young, but the destruction this time was not partial, it was not a battle as Kyuubi had even been. It had been annihilation. It had been almost everything being carved out from the inside, and even his ROOT hadn’t made it out unscathed. 

His contenders would never understand his absolute heart-stopping fear that only the darkness of Konoha was left to rebuild it, that those crafted for defense and killing would have to _create._ He knew it changed something inside, but he was old, and change was hard.

In his case, change was something that would lead to mistakes, horrible, blinded mistakes. He closed his eyes, and let grief, desperation, carry him forward. He let things he had railed and fought against for decades be what ruled him, and he only came back to clarity on the eve of his death.

So he took his own life, and he did it willingly, because he’d lost his logic, he’d lost his objectivity, but he would not leave his secrets to the enemy that started the worst of the spiral. He didn’t believe in the last Uchiha child to keep anything safe…

But in the end, he had no choice but to hope, and it was a bitter, bitter feeling to know that was all he left behind.

 _Faith_ and _Hope_ in those he had trained to steer those he hadn’t onto the right path.

How terribly he wished he’d had anything else to leave behind… but he didn’t have a choice, and when his time was up… he went, because he could see again, and knew that there was no other way.

Because there almost never was.


End file.
